Machine Tool - History

History

Machine tools filled a need created by textile machinery during the Industrial Revolution in England in the middle to late 1700s. Until that time machinery was made mostly from wood, often including gearing and shafts. The increase in mechanization required more metal parts, which were usually made of cast iron or wrought iron. Cast iron could be cast in molds for larger parts, such as engine cylinders and gears, but was difficult to work with a file and could not be hammered. Red hot wrought iron could be hammered into shapes. Room temperature wrought iron was worked with a file and chisel and could be made into gears and other complex parts; however, hand working lacked precision and was a slow and expensive process.

James Watt was unable to have an accurately bored cylinder for his first steam engine, trying for several years until John Wilkinson invented a suitable boring machine in 1774, boring Boulton & Watt's first commercial engine in 1776.

The advance in the accuracy of machine tools can be traced to Henry Maudslay and refined by Joseph Whitworth. That Maudslay had established the manufacture and use of master plane gages in his shop (Maudslay & Field) located on Westminster Road south of the Thames River in London about 1809, was attested to by James Nasmyth who was employeed by Maudslay in 1829 and Nasmyth documented their use in his autobiography.

The process by which the master plane gages were produced dates back to antiquity but were refined to an unprecedented degree in the Maudslay shop. The process begins with three plates each given an identification (ex., 1,2 and 3). The first step is to rub plates 1 and 2 together with a marking medium (called bluing today) revealing the high spots which would be removed by hand scraping with a steel scraper, until no irregularities were visible. This would not produce absolutely true plane surfaces but a "ball and socket" fit, as this mechanical fit, like two perfect planes, can slide over each other and reveal no high spots. Next, plate number 3 would be compared and scraped to conform to plate number 1. In this manner plates number 2 and 3 would be identical. Next plates number 2 and 3 would be checked against each other to determine what condition existed, either both plates were "balls" or "sockets". These would then be scraped until no high spots existed and then compared to plate number 1. After repeating this process, comparing and scraping the three plates together, they would automatically generate exact true plane surfaces accurate to within millionths of an inch.

The traditional method of producing the surface gages used an abrasive powder rubbed between the plates to remove the high spots, but it was Whitworth who contributed the refinement of replacing the grinding with hand scraping. Sometime after 1825 Whitworth went to work for Maudslay and it was there that Whitworth perfected the hand scraping of master surface plane gages. In his paper presented to the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Glasgow in 1840, Whitworth pointed out the inherent inaccuracy of grinding due to no control and thus unequal distribution of the abrasive material between the plates which would produce uneven removal of material from the plates.

With the creation of master plane gages of such high accuracy, all critical components of machine tools (i.e., guiding sufaces such as machine ways) could then be compared against them and scraped to the desired accuracy.

The first machine tools offered for sale (i.e., commercially available) were constructed by Matthew Murray in England around 1800. Others, such as Henry Maudslay, James Nasmyth, and Joseph Whitworth, soon followed the path of expanding their entrepreneurship from manufactured end products and millwright work into the realm of building machine tools for sale.

Important early machine tools included the slide rest lathe, screw-cutting lathe, turret lathe, milling machine, pattern tracing lathe (shaper) and metal planer, which were all in use before 1840. With these machine tools the decades old objective of interchangeable parts was finally realized. An important early example, which is now taken for granted was the standardization of screw fasteners such as nuts and bolts. Before about the beginning of the 19th century, these were used in pairs, and even screws of the same machine were generally not interchangeable. Methods were developed to cut screw thread to a greater precision than that of the feed screw in the lathe being used. This led to the bar length standards of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Forerunners of machine tools included bow drills and potter's wheels, which had existed in ancient Egypt prior to 2500 BCE, and lathes are known to have existed in multiple regions of Europe since at least 1000 to 500 BCE. But it was not until the later Middle Ages and the Age of Enlightenment that the modern concept of a machine tool—a class of machines used as tools in the making of metal parts, and incorporating machine-guided toolpath—began to evolve. Clock makers of the Middle Ages and renaissance men such as Leonardo da Vinci helped expand humans' technological milieu toward the preconditions for industrial machine tools. During the 18th and 19th centuries, and even in many cases in the 20th, the builders of machine tools tended to be the same people who would then use them to produce the end products (manufactured goods). However, from these roots also evolved an industry of machine tool builders as we define them today, meaning people who specialize in building machine tools for sale to others.

The demand for machine tools has been driven by various manufacturing industries over the centuries. The human desire for firearms (from small arms through artillery) was the earliest, and it has lasted as a top driver through the present. Lathes and boring machines for boring cannon barrels led the way. The next major impetus of machine tool development was the building of textile machinery during the Industrial Revolution in England. Historians of machine tools often focus on a handful of major industries that most spurred machine tool development. In order of historical emergence, they have been firearms (small arms and artillery); clocks; textile machinery; steam engines (stationary, marine, rail, and otherwise; the story of how Watt's need for an accurate cylinder spurred Boulton's boring machine is discussed by Roe (1916)); sewing machines; bicycles; automobiles; and aircraft. Others could be included in this list as well, but they tend to be connected with the root causes already listed. For example, rolling-element bearings are an industry of themselves, but this industry's main drivers of development were the vehicles already listed—trains, bicycles, automobiles, and aircraft; and other industries, such as tractors, farm implements, and tanks, borrowed heavily from those same parent industries.